Tuesday, April 28, 2015

I have recently finished reading ' Java EE7 Development with Wildfly' by Michał Ćmil, Michał Matłoka and Francesco Marchioni, from Packt, I really liked it, since it covers two of my favorite subjects. JavaEE7 is my technology stack of choice, so I really like reading books around it and Wildfly which I personally believe is the leading JavaEE container in the market.

Overall the book keeps it's promise, it introduces to the reader all the major and hot topics around day to day JavaEE7 based development and guides you through the specifics of Wildfly as your container.

The first two chapters cover basic ground like javaEE principles and a setup guide of Wildfly. In some points some references to Wildfly tips and tricks were considered very handy.

The next 4-5 chapters where covering major areas like EJB3, JMS, CDI , Web Service (SOAP or REST based) and WebSockets. The book does not try to 'teach you' in full depth all the details of the specification but covers more than basic ground that would most probably satisfy junior to senior developers. The fact that the samples are implemented towards a specific application server give the authors the flexibility to 'help' potential junior level developers to start working and evaluating the specification quickly through the samples provided.

There are several examples where a step by step approach using an IDE (Eclipse) is featured but also maven is also covered. I have to be honest I was not very interested on the IDE integration and tooling part of the examples but I can clearly understand that this is a great help for less experienced developers.

When it comes to the code examples I really liked that the authors kept using and illustrating features derived from the CDI specification, despite the fact that they could just 'stay' close to EJB injection and integration. CDI is going to become even more dominant as a technology and programming paradigm in the upcoming versions of the JavaEE spec, and I really liked the fact that the authors provided real handy examples on many cases, illustrating patterns and ways on building your code.

There are also 2 chapters covering areas like Security in terms of deployment on Wildfly and a very hot topic on Clustering. Especially the latter, is a very nice and pragmatic induction to clustering a JavaEE app in a Wildfly, so make sure you dont miss this chapter especially if is your first time attacking such related problems.

Overall I think it is a book worth buying. It is not a JavaEE Spec reference book, but I dont think it meant to be from the beginning. What the book promises and delivers is to guide you through the most important parts of the Java EE specification through a solid application server and code examples that you can even use (or take ideas) in your day to day development. I guess companies or teams that are willing to migrate to JavaEE and specifically to Wildfly, should add this book on their collection.